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These works begin on the reverse side of historical maps by al-Idrisi, the 12th-century Arab geographer and cartographer whose atlas was the first to accurately depict Eurasia. The pages are not blank: they carry the ghosted pressure of ink from the front—leaking, bleeding, and imprinting through paper over centuries. What appears here are not the maps themselves, but their residues: faint coastlines, distorted grids, half-erased geographies.

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From a pirated version of his book, I screen shot these verso pages and print them, treating them as fragile terrains already shaped by time, moisture, and archival decay. From there, I intervene carefully—choosing what to trace, what to underline, what to leave untouched. Small gestures of color, line, and dot become acts of attention rather than illustration. The original cartography remains present but illegible, surfacing only as pressure, stain, and trace.

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These works occupy a space between scientific mapping and mnemonic drift. They echo colonial and pre-colonial regimes of knowledge—systems that sought to define, measure, and contain the world—yet here those systems have lost their authority. What remains is a porous geography: unstable, wounded, and open to reinterpretation.

By working with the backside of al-Idrisi’s maps, I am drawn to what history leaves behind but does not fully erase: the underside of knowledge, the afterimage of power, the material memory embedded in paper. These drawings do not map places as they are or were. They map what persists when representation collapses—when borders, names, and coordinates dissolve, but the ground still remembers.

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Archival inkjet print on paper with watercolor, ink, and graphite

8.3 × 11.7 in